Students from Advertising, Media Communications and Art combined to form a small ad agency taught by two Webster alumni who work in the field.

Webster students in the School of Communications won second place in the National Student Advertising Competition (NSAC) regionals in Kansas City last week.

The NSAC is an annual contest held by the American Advertising Federation for teams of college students. Each year a corporate sponsor provides an assignment outlining the history of a product and current advertising situation. The students must research the product, its competition, identify potential problem areas and devise a completely integrated communications campaign. Each student team works as a small ad agency and then “pitches” it’s campaign to a panel of judges.

For the competition, the Webster students formed an “agency” they called BlackBird Creative and put together a campaign for Walmart and Glidden Paint. They competed against the other schools in the NSAC District 9: Clarke University, Drake University, Drury University, St. Louis University, University of Missouri-Columbia, University of Missouri-St. Louis, University of Nebraska-Lincoln and University of Northern Iowa. They tied for second place with Drury. The first-place award went to University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Webster alumni Julie Clark, associate creative director at Momentum Worldwide, and Michael Whitmer from Novus International teach the course. They both participated in the class twice during their time at Webster.

“We are incredibly proud of the students’ commitment to the class and their campaign,” Clark said. “Together, they built an award-winning, integrated marketing campaign for Glidden paint at Walmart. The Webster team’s creativity, hard work and dedication were evident on the AAF District 9 NSAC competition stage last Friday.”

The students who competed were a mix of junior and senior Advertising majors with one Media Communications major and one Art major. These are the students who made up BlackBird Creative: